Here's to a Life Less Read?

They’re saying that Sally Rooney is having a moment.

“They” are the critics, and they’ve pronounced Rooney the first great millennial novelist. Of course “first great millennial novelist” sounds like something an impossibly old person would say.

Be that as it may, the old and young, and the establishment and non-, all seem to agree that not only is Rooney serious and good, but she is serious and good in a way that is particular to how we in our age-group are supposed to be particular.

She is telegraphic, like someone who writes online, and is frank and un-withholding, like someone who writes to intimates at a distance. She foregrounds politics, but she doesn’t pretend to have any more idea about what to do about the state of things than the rest of us.

Of course, Rooney is of the left. She is of the young-person’s left. If the young-person’s left shows some traces of the 20th-century cult of the artist as intellectual (and vice-versa), they are refreshingly insouciant and intolerant about the romanticized (and implicitly depoliticized) bullshit that sustained the cult.

Here’s a sample of the intolerance of bullshit that I mean: Rooney’s economical Marxian take on literature as commodity:

“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag’s Head, Sadie threw her hands up and said Not politics, please! Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance. Literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status-symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.”

Wowow, as the kids say. I dare you to find something pithier or more provocative in the discourse about the state of literature and political commitment.

“And yet,” I hear you say “still she writes.” That she does.

Because Rooney still does choose to write, maybe we can say that in the passages like above, she is only doing a performative self-critique.

Critics have said that Rooney interjects leftist cant into her characters’ dialog, but that political dialog does little more than to show us that such characters are au courant, as in touch with the return of materialist analysis as with any other ephemeral trend that will leave our world more or less as it found it.

To me, this isn’t a failing of Rooney’s, but a recognition of just the kind of world that the 2008 generation inherited, one whose problems provoke us politically but whose solutions are well beyond what we have known as possible.

We don’t have to hear Rooney’s message as one of despair. We can rather read it as something a most un-Marxian and un-radical lesson: which is not to abandon politics in what we do, but to do immanent critique of the enterprise we’re engaged in, to know its limits, and to understand the structures in which it lives and on which it builds.

Of course there’s plenty to write about and fight for in the world, and do it meaningfully, we have got to stay wary of the solipsistic and self-aggrandizing modes of artistic-intellectual politics that have put so many people off politics altogether and left them with nothing but their books.

Confronting the Democratic Front

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of political commitment. Specifically, if you’re into politics, maybe you should be committed to a therapeutic institution because it is likely to bring on derangement, paranoia, delusions of grandeur and what else.

I have never been a very politically-committed person, but lately, I can’t kick the derangement and delusions that have come along with living in a political world.

A old leftist saying has it that even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is interested in you. It means that you’re confined to a world ruled by powerful forces whether you want to be or not, so you might as well do something to protect yourself and your own.

Nowadays, we hear, there is a threat to us and our own, our whole species, in the destruction of the nonhuman world on which we depend. Even if climate change weren’t upon us, there is the increase in precarity for most people in the US, a majority into which as a newly-unemployed PhD, I fall. Then of course there is the global decline in democracy and democratic institutions amid the rise of renewed rightwing extremism, but really if democracy can’t deal with the first two issues, what’s it good for?

So, what’s to be done? Join a mass movement to change things of course! And as inconvenient as that is for my inherited prejudices against mass movements, mass culture, mass-anything, the credible alternatives are rapidly discrediting themselves.

They are discrediting themselves, at least to me, to the extent that they put up something we can call a “Democratic Front”.

Here, I’m evoking the idea of the French “Republican Front”. The idea goes like this: should a far-right movement arise in France, it’s the duty of everyone else: the conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists, and all the others, to resist it. The reason behind this is idea is probably the war and all that.

I wonder if there isn’t something parallel in American life, an implicit pact among the press, both parties, and the major US institutions that a movement from the left, a real one, must be similarly opposed by everybody. The reason behind this is likely the cold war and all that.

Why would anyone sign on now that the cold war is over? Well, it may be over for us under 40, but the political class came of age in the cold war, many in the paranoid 1960s.

In the ‘60s we also got the intellectual basis of the Democratic Front: the bipartisan consensus of philosophy of neoliberalism. While we can imagine neoliberalism surviving under fascism, it would not under socialism. Even the moderate, lightly-Nordic-accented social democracy offered by Bernie Sanders and AOC is too great a risk for the philosophy.

Where can we see the Democratic Front?

We can see it in the Democratic party’s near-coronation of Joe Biden as its 2020 nominee. Biden is the 76-year old architect of mass incarceration, who has never met a war he didn’t support, and is uncomfortable with even the Obama administration’s extremely superficial environmental agenda.

But with the threat to the Democratic Front, even the moderation of Pete Buttigieg might hint at the left on environmental issues, and so an elite white neocon is too close to the edge for comfort.

We can see the Democratic front’s fear of the incipient progressive movement in Congress, which has been swiftly excluded from power and even serious consideration. I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

We can see the Democratic Front in patterns of the mainstream media’s alarm. Consider the shock in the liberal press at the prospects that public health care would devastate the insurance industry. Millions will be on the street we are told.

However, these reasonable media, who inform the the Democratic Front’s alliance of reasonable people, are meanwhile unfazed by the extremist precarity of medical costs and medical debts. In the US, it’s not really news, it’s just a fact of life. It’s “the price we have all agreed to pay” for our system, our way of life, and questioning this arrangement is as unthinkable in the liberal press as supporting the Vichy in France.

Of course, lots of French people are warming to the Vichy these days. The Republican Front held itself together for the 2017 French elections of course. However, its longer-term fate is unclear despite united elite-institutional support.

So perhaps after another round of impotent but inveterate moderation, the Democratic front will lose its aura of historical inviolability.

The idea that we can turn back the momentum of history sounds like a political delusion of grandeur (can you imagine a more romantic idea). But lately I am thinking that what must be done is clear, and so romance that helps our spirits along the way might not be such a bad thing.

Our opponents have not let probability or reasonableness dissuade them from their commitment, and they are rapidly remaking the world in which we live.

What a Piece of Work is Man, Part 2: Man Up

This post is the second in a two-part series in the aftermath of a report by the American Psychiatric Association warning of the bad effects of traditional masculinity, which has caused considerable consternation on the right. In this series, I’ll be addressing the online manosphere and masculinist community not as a finger-wagging lefty, but a sympathetic fellow android, or imagine that, if you will.

In my less-than-nuanced last post, I addressed the manosphere about what I thought was the real war on masculinity.

Now I’d like to imagine that the war is over, so now can consider what to salvage and reconstruct. I want to ask about what a man could be.

I should begin by saying this may for various reasons not be a question you think needs or deserves an answer. You may be, or want to be, something else entirely.

Moreover, the idea of masculinity is broader and more complicated than manhood, and vice versa.

However, I’ll be limiting myself to discursive manhood and the question of how men should orient themselves to discourses about masculinity or manhood.

I have two thoughts.

First, I have to disagree with the APA and say that the term “traditional masculinity” doesn’t seem to mean much of anything in real life anymore.

I’m more confident in saying that the people, chiefly conservatives, who say they’re upholding “traditional masculinity” are really just using that concept as a club to beat up cardboard caricatures of others. They live in and want to bring out a world that’s radically different from the one they try to conjure with the term.

What do I mean?

For a white Americans, the term “traditional masculinity” conjures an image like the Puritan, the pioneer, the cowboy. The words conjures the image of men with a rough and tumble settler-colonial mindset shaped first and foremost by physical strife, struggle, and danger.

However, this image is totally inconsistent with the right-wing media game and right-wing politics.

Think about anti-immigrant sentiment, the animating force of the modern right. Aside from outright racism, the anti-immigrant conservatives tend to think that people, especially men, from the global south are unfit for civilized society precisely because they have born those pains and precarities characteristic of life in a place that isn’t civilized.

In other words, they’d bring their frightful traumas here! How could we trust people who have been subjected to social and political turmoil with our delicate norms and practices?

Delicacy is another point. Conservatives, especially online, revel in the idea of triggering the oversensitive. But I’m hardly the first to point out how much conservative media depend performative outrage at minuscule microaggressions.

I don’t need to dwell on Trump, the master of theatrical offense.

But can you imagine a more thin-skinned sybarite? Can you imagine someone less materially and dispositionally welcome in our imagined macho context like Sparta, Manchuria, or the armies of the Muslim conquests?

The winter is bitterly cold in Chicago winter at the moment. So the example I have on my mind right now is Governor Matt Bevin, a Republican from Kentucky. When told that schools had to close because temperatures are in the negative double digits, he remarked, no doubt to the delight of the traditional-masculinity crowd, that the country was “getting too soft”, that we’d better toughen up.

The problem is, there’s just no toughening up past a certain point. Temperatures that low are physically lethal. Someone exposed to those temperatures can’t just grit their teeth. People stranded, infirm, or without homes have died and been injured because no amount of Oregon-trail grit can sustain your life or limbs if a bus is late or power fails. It is a physical, not a moral-constitutional condition.

It is not only that Bevin is so casually and performatively cruel. He’s also absolutely clueless. Bevin is, and is speaking to an audience that is, so removed from any but the most abstract sense of danger and harm, that his rhetoric can’t differentiate between life and death.

You might object that conservatives aren’t all soft-handed fakers. There are plenty of soldiers and ranch-hands on the right.

To this I can only say that the politicians and pundits who shape the traditional-masculinity discourse are so alien to that lifeway that their performative invocations of it can only be described as drag.

My second thought on the APA report has to do with its recommendation that men not be afraid to be sensitive and get in touch with their feelings.

I’m going to be a contrarian and say that contemporary men could stand to be less in touch with their feelings.

Now, I am a big believer that human emotions are meaningful grounds for moral reflection; I’m there with Mengzi, Wang Yangming, Hume, Nussbaum, and others.

But consider how feminists critique the phenomenon male tears.

Feminist critiques of male tears draw on anti-racist critiques of white tears. White tears are what happen when sympathetic whites colonize activists spaces and take up everyone’s focus and time exorcising their guilt for complicity in racism. These episodes are invasive for one, but also ugly, indecent, and embarrassing.

Likewise, men seem to be in a passionate crush of performative sympathy with women. They seem quick to claim that their emotional tribulations and anxieties give them grounds to understand the violence and structural exclusion women go through. But they don’t.

What is more likely is that, like white anti-racists, feminist men are just over-eager to have their guilt assuaged. They want credit for the most banal expressions of support.

Worse, in recent years, I have noticed and heard that when women talk about discrimination and sexual violence, men often inundate them with unsolicited tearful confessions and apologies. Sometimes these men are strangers who just needed to share something.

If the manosphere would ask my advice (and we’re pretending they did), I’d risk saying something extreme. I’s say: unless you’re talking to your priest or your therapist, don’t talk about how hard it is to be a man, really ever, and don’t cry, really don’t.

I’d say to the manosphere that when we deal with the ups and downs of life, we have got to relearn the difference between speaking out against injustice, which we absolutely have to do, and just airing our feelings, our anxieties, and our grievances.

For this latter kind of talk, we’ve got to be very, very conservative about it, especially around people who aren’t men.

Now, maybe my thoughts on the APA recommendations sound harsh and repressive, but I think they’re contextual. I don’t think things will be like this forever, fortunately.

As much as men now seem at a loss for a morally, spiritually, politically, and esthetically affirmative masculinity, history gives us a lot to think on and choose from. Manhood across cultures and times is extraordinarily diverse.

Achilles, the manliest man in Western myth, wept over his boyfriend’s body and rubbed him with oil. Muslim Sunna literature describes how the prophet, the ultimate among men, wore make-up, and his two pleasures were perfume and women as much as his comfort was prayer. George Washington, the daddy of this freakin’ country, dressed in tight hose and corsets and wrote about table-manners in the most delicate way.

I’m being flippant here both to mock the shallow, repressed, and largely fake image of manhood proffered by Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and DC. This may be the mainstream taste of the moment, but taste is a lagging indicator of social change. The more equal society we should fight for will have more and different ideas of manhood and non-manhood.

This brings me to two thoughts on manhood I want to close with.

The first is one I haven’t mentioned, which is moral behavior and political striving. We’ve got to respect our fellow men, and people who aren’t our fellow men, according to how they represent themselves and their needs. We need to strive for a more equitable society for our own sake and for everyone’s sake.

The second is to reiterate the contextual value of restraint in our expression of what’s bothering us and what we’re asking sympathy for.

To put those two as my last advice for the manosphere: be human and be a man.